Men are not islands

Original language: Italian

Original title: Men are not islands

Translation: Jordi Bayod

Year of publication: 2018

Valuation: Recommendable

Poor Nuccio Ordine died a few months before he was awarded, a few weeks ago, the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. He is also a badass, although this man, a professor and a deep connoisseur of the classics, must have already been accustomed to public recognition because in his biography there are a few distinctions from organizations and universities in different countries. Come on, he is one of those characters in whose life there seems to have been time to write, teach, research, and also do everything well, how wonderful.

From what I see, at least what refers to his best-known books, Ordine likes to use an essay format that has cemented his greatest publishing successes: using a collection of fragments of classics to which he refers to a general idea or a more important aspect. or less concrete of life. In this case, the core is located in the expression that gives the book its title, taken from John Donne: men are not islands, we are parts of a whole that must work together, and therefore what happens to others is also happening to ourselves. A thought that seems closely related to Christianity (perhaps more with Catholicism), and that forcefully confronts the individualism prevalent in recent decades.

This idea occupies a long introduction of almost one hundred pages, also supported by authors of different origins and periods, from Seneca and Cicero to Tolstoy, passing through Montaigne, Shakespeare or Saint-Exupéry, to whom he dedicates a large section that I would like to highlight, because the analysis of some fragments of The little Prince I find it the most intelligent and interesting thing I have read about this book that, I have to confess, has never seduced me in the least. This introduction closes with a powerful diatribe against the current desideratum of educational systems, impregnated with utilitarianism, factories of individuals suitable for the labor market (or at least trained with that intention) who in the near future will be ‘armies of entrepreneurs and buyers’. The commercial drift of teaching means that everything that cannot be made profitable in the short term is ignored, the arts, philosophy, research, history. Instead of training people with values, capable of thinking and reasoning for themselves, the immediate usefulness of automatons ready to produce and consume is sought. The system demands it this way, and in the end we all end up accepting it or applauding it, starting with parents and continuing with politicians of all stripes.

In what is properly the body of the book, Ordine opens the focus a little more to introduce an important parade of classics, about fifty, each of which leaves us a small fragment on which the author reflects briefly in a couple of pages. To take a few names at random, we find Aristotle, Ibsen, Camões, Dante, Plutarch, Hemingway or Virginia Woolf, authors of all times (curious, only three of them in the Spanish language) and works of all genres, essays, novels , poetry, serve Ordine to dwell on aspects of life that may lack immediate usefulness, but on which it would be advisable to stop and dedicate a few minutes to broaden our minds and be able to see with a broader perspective.

The importance of a teacher to discover the talent of a young person or encourage him to find it, reading as a journey, the diligence of the ruler who takes care of the public good, a reflection on the beginning and the end of things, the value of those who take sides , women who rebel against their traditional role, curiosity and tolerance as engines of knowledge and coexistence, the power of music and culture, the need to contemplate people inside, stripped of their positions and tinsel. Something that sounds a lot like Montaigne, although based on more recognizable works and authors, a good repertoire of themes that touch us very closely, in our relationships, in politics or professionally, in our way of seeing the world, points to reflection that requires a slow reading, and preferably punctual and sporadic, as happens with texts of this nature.

Because the truth is that in all those classics that Ordine presents to us, or at least in those that I may know, we can also find lies, corruption, violence, revenge, wars, hatred and deception. But the author has had the ability to find those passages, and there are many, that show us what we could call the reasonable side of the human being, texts in which they invite us to see life without ceasing to search for truth and beauty, Humanity as that great ocean made up of small elements that each of us is, all dependent on each other and with inevitably common interests although too often it may not seem like it.

It is therefore not a canon of the most beautiful fragments or essential works, it is most likely that this reading will not call us to know the original sources, because that is not really what it is about. They are only small and well-searched excuses to show how not everything has been evil and depravity, and there have always been individuals, surely the wisest, who have also known how to tell us the important and valuable things that humans have left on the planet, who also there is.

Other works by Nuccio Ordine at ULAD: The usefulness of the useless, Classics for life